Enemy within? Hardly... most people see why we need unions prepared to strike

theguardian.com:

The Tories love the working class. So long as workers can help them win red wall seats. So long as they can paint them as “socially conservative” and use them as alibis for legislation hostile to immigrants or welfare claimants. So long as they can exploit them as props for a fantasy levelling up agenda.

But the moment workers take matters into their own hands, assert their collective voice and take action to preserve wages and conditions, they are denounced as militants and the enemy within; even, ludicrously, as “Putin’s friend”, as Tory MP Tobias Elwood claimed about RMT strikers. Tories like the idea of the working class in the abstract, as individuals who might vote for them every five years, but not the working class in the flesh, as people who act collectively to defend their rights.

Critics of the RMT, in the government and beyond, have attempted to portray strikes as an immoral weapon wielded by uncaring union bosses to “hold the country to ransom”. In fact, strikes are weapons of the powerless, not the powerful, a means of restoring a modicum of balance in a highly unequal relationship between employers and workers.

Corporations have myriad ways of imposing their power on employees: cutting wages, enforcing redundancies, tearing up contracts, withdrawing investment. When companies threaten to close down plants if their redundancy or wage cut plans are not accepted, or to move investment elsewhere if they don’t receive sufficient sweeteners, few call it “holding the country to ransom”. But that’s exactly what it is – and with far more leverage than unions could ever muster.

The main deterrent workers collectively possess in response to the power of employers is the withdrawal of their labour. No one takes strike